Monday: 7:30 A.M. English Class

Minnie Phillips is bracing for her first-period 10th-grade English students. She always has them at 7:30 a.m., a launch time that is an insult to the teenage metabolism.

"Would you please turn to page 23 in your vocabulary workbook?"

A groan. "Can't we just sleep instead?" Phillips runs through some words--assuage, brandish, staid--before getting down to business, a discussion of Eugenia Collier's short story Sweet Potato Pie. "What's unusual about this title?" No one bites, so she answers her own question. "It has pie! Now how many of you have not had sweet-potato pie?"

Only a few raise their hands. "What's wrong with you all?" smirks Ebony Ingram. "Look, it's all the white boys." Two of the parents promised Phillips last week at parents' night that they would send in a pie for this morning's class; neither seems to have remembered.

Phillips tells the class of a restaurant she went to over the weekend that served the pie, as well as ham hocks, collard greens and smothered beef stew. "And what do all these things have in common?" The white students are still stumped when Robert Givens chimes in. "No offense to my Caucasian friends, but sounds to me like you were eating black foods," he says.

"Well, they're soul food," Phillips says. And with that the class starts spitting out associations, and she is at the board writing: tradition, culture, grandmother, filling, ample. Now everyone is paying attention.

Phillips, a sharecropper's daughter, is one of those magical teachers whom you could imagine in a hundred roles: talk- show host, prison warden, poet laureate, mayor of a midsize city. She teaches some of the best kids in the school and some of the worst, but like many teachers, it's the ones in the middle she is concerned about. "In trying to be something for everybody, we're not doing an intensive job for any group," she says. "There's something noble about this mission, but it doesn't always serve students well."

This class includes kids on the cusp. About half say they plan to go to college. One already knows he wants to join the Army, become an MP, then be a cop. "Better be a crooked cop," a classmate advises him. "That's where the money is." One is great with computers. One says beer is his life. Many have some trouble with their writing skills. They say their dream classroom would have no desks, just couches.

Like many teachers, Phillips has enormous control over what gets taught in her classroom and yet admits she is constrained when it comes to standards and expectations, like assigning homework. She guesses about 15% in her class actually do it, which means she can't base Tuesday's class on readings that no one did the night before. Bright kids get bored; slow kids get lost; the kids in the middle muddle through. Her colleague Bob Hutcheson puts it this way: "I wonder if among their peers, there isn't a certain norm of mediocrity. And if they shoot for the middle, they'll always settle for less."